I Found God in Soviet Russia

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I FOUND GOD IN SOVIET RUSSIA

By

JOHN NOBLE

And

GLENN D. EVERETT

With an Introduction by

REV. BILLY GRAHAM

I Found God in Soviet Russia was originally published in 1959 by St. Martin’s Press, New York.

* * *

This book is dedicated

to all those still in labor camps and

dungeons suffering persecution for

their stand and for their trust in God.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

Introduction 5

I — A Mission to Fulfill 7

II — I Learn to Pray 9

III — Faith in a Flag 17

IV — Trial by Hunger 19

V — The Miracle of Bread 22

VI — Helping Others 29

VII — Rescued from My Tormentors 33

VIII — More than Coincidence 37

IX — Witnessing for Christ 41

X — A Stunning Blow 46

XI — Into the Land of the Godless 53

XII — The Miracle of the Nuns 58

XIII — An Heroic Priest 64

XIV — Loyal Lutherans 68

XV — Brave Baptists 72

XVI — Russia’s Religious Freedom 75

XVII — An Unexpected Opportunity 81

XVIII — Life Among the Godless 84

XIX — The MVD Men Read the Bible 88

XX — The Trial of Unanswered Prayer 93

XXI — Land of Disenchantment 98

XXII — Return to Freedom 102

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 104

Introduction

By Reverend Billy Graham

NOT long ago, John Noble crossed the border of East Berlin into the American sector. Haggard and gaunt due to nearly ten years of Soviet imprisonment, this American citizen reappeared after being swallowed up in the Russian zone of Germany shortly after V-E Day, in 1945.

John Noble has brought back a remarkable story. It is not just a bleak account of the terrible things that happened to him during that decade in the concentration camps of Mühlberg and Buchenwald, in prisons all the way from Dresden to the Arctic, but an amazing account of the survived of Christian faith in the communist prisons and camps he has known.

Here is a still-young American Protestant layman telling the world for the first time of the valiant heroism of Christian laymen and clergy whom he found among his fellow prisoners in the dove labor camps and especially in the dread camp of Vorkuta. It is a story of Lutheran pastors from Latvia and Estonia, Catholic priests from Lithuania and Poland, Russian Orthodox priests from the Ukraine and Russia itself, and Baptist leaders from all over the Soviet Union. It is a story of thousands upon thousands of laymen and women who remain loyal to Christ and by their example gain converts in the very place where Christianity has been most bitterly persecuted.

John Noble tells us, too, of the Russian people whom he met, the so-called free workers, and the supervisors of the mines. He describes the deep inner hunger he found among them for a faith that offers more than the dead end of Marxist materialism. He tells us that even members of the elite Soviet police, hardened Communists all, are disillusioned with the system they serve and are searching for a better way of life.

The thing that the Russian people are missing is faith.

Noble shows us, in keen unforgettable citations of specific fact, how the Russian people feel this lack of contact with the eternal values of Christ in their everyday lives. He has returned not with bitterness but with love and understanding in his heart for those at whose hands he has suffered so much.

Throughout the world, in America, in England, in India, in Australia, there is a new spirit moving, a new search in the hearts and minds of men seeking God. We are indebted to John Noble for bringing us word from the Church behind Barbed Wire that the religious revival in our time is, by God’s grace, reaching even into the most distant and isolated areas of the world, the concentration camps of the Soviet Union.

Here is a story that will inspire every Christian! It is one of the great testimonies of our time, given by a man who himself experienced personal conversion while in solitary confinement in a Communist prison cell and who has seen in his own life the power of God to answer prayer.

He brings us word of fellow Christians holding aloft the torch of faith in an area where its gleam has been darkened. He tells us of the unconquerable faith that can win Russia, even as it rose from the lion pits of the Coliseum to sweep Rome.

Let us pray for God’s blessing upon those from whom John Noble has brought word to the free world; let us pray that their steadfast faith will convince Marxists of the error of worshiping men and material things alone. Let all who read this story be inspired to place their faith in Jesus Christ, as John Noble has placed his, to the end that mankind will triumph over the forces of godless tyranny.

I — A Mission to Fulfill

DURING the decade I spent in communist prisons and labor camps I saw many terrible things. I also saw some glorious ones, things more heartening than any other news I bring out of the Soviet Union. My message is this: I found God in Soviet Russia.

I found God for myself through personal conversion and, even more significantly for the world at large, I met many others who had had a similar experience. I discovered that the Christian religion is surviving communist persecution in East Germany and in Soviet Russia itself. I found that secret worship services were held and converts won for Christ even in Vorkuta itself, one of the slave-labor camps in the Soviet Arctic.

Having learned to speak and understand Russian, I found myself in close contact with Russian engineers and workers, and realized that there is deep interest in the Christian religion among both groups. In spite of their forty-year exposure to official atheism, or perhaps because of it, they hunger for the spiritual values they have been denied.

This evidence I am able to bring back to the free world, and through it the glorious tidings of a faith that cannot be killed. I have seen Christianity under the most terrible persecution it has suffered since the days of Nero, and I have seen abundant proof that faith in Christ, the Savior, is still alive in Russia today in the very places where the Communists have tried hardest to stamp it out, the Concentration camps. It is triumphant testimony I have to give concerning the Church behind Barbed Wire, and I am convinced it was God’s will that I be a member of that persecuted Church for several years in order to testify that God is with it and is sustaining it.

The fact that I survived all I had been exposed to, and was enabled to return to America in good health, before the drastic sentence imposed by a Moscow court had run its full course, is proof to me that God was with me, that there was a purpose in my survival which, as I look back upon the successive phases of my prison experiences, seems nothing less than miraculous. I thank God from the bottom of my heart for His mercy.

I wish that this mission to testify had been given to someone more eloquent than I—or rather that I, to whom it has been given, were more eloquent. But I was there in Russia and am now here in America; the story is mine. As I try to convey it to the free world, I think of the words of Job. Many times during my long imprisonment, when I was tempted to lose faith and to cry out against the injustice and hardships inflicted upon me, I thought of Job. He, too, endured much for reasons that he could not understand but nothing could shake him from his faith. In his famous pledge, he declared, All the while my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils, my lips shall not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit (Job 27-34).

Job’s pledge is my pledge, also. So long as breath is in me, I will not speak falsehood. So long as the spirit of God is with me, I cannot utter deceit. Out of a sense of solemn obligation to God I will speak the truth to the free world about the wonders I have seen.

II — I Learn to Pray

THERE comes a time in every man’s life when he learns to pray. For me that moment came a few minutes after nine o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, February 13, 1945, in Dresden, Germany, in the midst of the devastating air raid that laid waste that beautiful city. For the first time in my life, I found myself on my knees praying earnestly to God.

How did I, an American, come to be in Dresden in the closing months of World War II? My parents, born in Germany but naturalized citizens of the United States, had returned to their native land to take up temporary residence in 1938. A year later, we were caught there by the beginnings of the war. I was twenty-one and, at the time of the Dresden raid, my parents, my older brother George, and I had been living under a kind of house arrest for nearly four years. We were confined within the city limits, our movements strictly watched.

It was ironic that I had to be in mortal peril, the concussion of exploding bombs literally blowing me off my feet and onto my knees, before I would turn to God as my refuge and salvation. My father, Charles Noble, was a religious man. In fact, in his youth he had been, for a brief time, a Christian minister. I had no valid excuse to offer for having become merely one more worldly young man.

It was simply backsliding. God had blessed our whole family generously with material bounty, but we were not properly thankful.

My father was born in Homburg, Kassel province, in 1892, where his father had owned a small shoemanufacturing plant. The family were Lutherans but, when my father was eleven, Grandfather converted to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, thanks to the efforts of an American missionary. The new faith meant a real sacrifice for him. Though the six-day week was universal in German factories, my grandfather would no longer operate his plant on Saturday and in winter had to close on Friday afternoon, for the sun set at 3:30 p.m. in midwinter and the Adventist Sabbath observance starts an hour before sunset.

The new faith also brought the family into conflict with the Prussian militarism of Kaiser Wilhelm II. In 1913, on the eve of the First World War, my father was drafted into the German Army. As a conscientious objector, he refused to shoulder a gun or perform any military duty on Saturday. He was hauled off to the stockade for insubordination. For five months, fortified by prayer, he endured increasing abuse and punishment. Then, one day, he was rescued from his plight by an extraordinary occurrence.

The inspector general was coming to look over the new conscripts and the captain ordered all the men, including my father, of course, to don their dress uniforms and line up on the parade ground. My father had suffered an injury in his youth which inclines his neck somewhat to one side; he has always carried his head at a peculiar tilt

When the men all lined up wearing their high-peaked Prussian helmets, my father’s head made an irregularity in the line. The general crisply ordered him to straighten up. When my father replied that he could not because of an old injury, the general ordered him sent to the hospital at once to see if the doctors could do something about it. The surgeons replied that the injury was permanent and the colonel of the regiment took this excuse to give my father a medical discharge.

My father spent World War I, which broke out a few months later, as a Red Cross worker on the Western front, bringing aid and what comfort he could to the wounded and dying. Though often under fire, he escaped without injury. Perhaps this was part of our trouble, he later reflected. God had showered us with so many blessings that we had come to expect them as a matter of course.

After the war, my father went to a Bible school. Adventist youth groups often came there for conferences. At one such gathering, he met an attractive girl, Hildegarde Gerling, whose family were also Adventists, and soon the couple married. Eventually, the Adventist Church in Germany split on questions of doctrine and my father became a minister for the small sect known as the Reformed Adventist Church. He went first to Berlin, then to Switzerland, and finally was sent to America to minister to the German immigrants in Detroit. He was conducting an evangelical meeting there in a tent on a street corner lot when I was born on September 4, 1923.

Few of the writings of Ellen Gould White, founder of the Adventist Movement, had been available in German. As my father came to know English, and read more extensively, he began to doubt the wisdom of some of the doctrines he was preaching. Being an honest man, he finally had to acknowledge that he could no longer urge others to join the Reformed Adventist Church when he himself entertained grave doubts about many of its tenets. Accordingly, he resigned as minister and afterwards did not join another church. Our family drifted along, rarely attending divine worship, paying less and less attention to religion as the years went by.

My father, still believing in the health value of the vegetarianism which Adventists advocate, started a small health-food business. Then in 1929 came a chance to enter the field of photography when the owner of the Stutz Photo Service in Detroit, for whom my mother worked as photo expert, died in an automobile collision and the business was put up for sale. My mother and father borrowed whatever they could and bought it. The eve of the great stock market crash of 1929 was hardly a propitious time to start a new enterprise, but our good fortune continued in a most extraordinary way.

My father, starting the business with no preconceived ideas, invested heavily in some new automatic photo-finishing equipment. As a result of this automation, we could process amateur photographers’ films more cheaply than our competitors,